Fulling for the Friends.

I finished the things I was knitting for the Friends of the Polk County Libraries booth at Autumnfest. These are fulled wine bottle sacks -- a re-usable gift wrap when you give a bottle of wine.

Hmmm. I really need to restain the deck railing.

Anyway...

Let's take a closer look. Aren't they cute and colorful?

These were tremendous fun to make, although I was getting a just a teensy bit tired of them by #5.

The big question is, how much to charge for one? What say y'all? Keep in mind this is an impoverished rural county. I am thinking $10/each, but that may be more than people are willing to pay. There will be at least two local wineries exhibiting at the festival; I'm hoping I can get one of them to put one of our sacks in their display.

The dirty deets:

Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, except for the blue in the center sack which was some Lopi Lite left over from another project. It didn't felt quite as well as the WotA but that didn't spoil the end result.
Needles: Knit Picks Options circ, US#8/5mm (I'm trying to learn the metric sizes); Magic Loop.
Pattern: A freebie that another member of the Friends found here.
Mods: None, except that due to inadequate pattern reading, I decreased on every row of the bottom instead of every other row. A tribute to felted knitting: it didn't matter.

Oh, and the pattern called for the tie to be a crochet chain; I made I-cord for the first two, but then switched to the chain. A crocheted chain takes roughly a minute and a half, I-cord of the same length somewhat longer. The Kat™ = Lazy.

The big fun of the project was choosing the colors. I put one skein of each color that could possibly be considered autumnal into a laundry basket; I picked one or two colors that appealed to me, then added and swapped out other colors until I had five that went together. I seemed to always end up with three darker, more intense colors and two lighter, more neutral colors.

I used a variation of the Fibonacci sequence for the stripe pattern: 2, 2, 4, 6. Since I had five colors and a 4-stripe pattern, the color sequence shifted over the course of the knitting. This had the added benefit that I used roughly the same amount of each color yarn in any particular sack.

It turns out that my Maytag front-loader fulls/felts just fine, even on the warm wash/cool rinse cycle. The sack at the far right in the first photo that is a bit shorter than the others didn't felt quite enough the first time through, so I threw it back into the washer for another go. That made it smaller than the others, but still okay. As Smokey and I like to tell each other when we find ourselves being way too anal over some inconsequential matter, This ain't brain surgery. Just do it and let's move on.